Wikipedia:Jewish Encyclopedia topics

Welcome to the Jewish Encyclopedia Topics Project
These pages contain a directory of topics covered in the public domain Jewish Encyclopedia [1]. Although the JE was published in 1901-1906 and thus does not cover major 20th century events such as the Holocaust, and the foundation of the State of Israel, it has few equals in providing a comprehensive English-language synthesis of pre-20th Century scholarship and opinions on Jewish history, religion, culture, and biography. Be aware, though, that more modern scholarship, and a more modern viewpoint-- in these topics is not covered; the best general source for this is the Encyclopedia Judaica -- in the second edition of 2006-7. It is not free, but all academic libraries have it, and most medium sized public libraries also. The "redlinked" items on the lists do not have direct equivalents in Wikipedia at present.

You may do the following things to make the redlinks go blue:

• Create a new article for the topic; or
• Redirect the redlink if there is a corresponding article on Wikipedia which bears an alternative name; and
• Merge any relevant material from the JE into Wikipedia.

There are several articles that are present in the Jewish Encyclopedia which already have topics in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not have some or any of the content which is present in the Jewish Encyclopedia. In many cases this is obvious when the article is about a Jewish topic (e.g., an aspect of the Torah) and contains much information easily collected from popular knowledge, but little or no information from academic studies. This is particularly obvious when an article contains no historical-critical information. If you spot an article that has such an appearance, it may be worth checking the corresponding article(s) on the Jewish Encyclopedia.

Once done, please do not delete the topic from the list (now blue-linked), but preserve it so we can continue to compare JE articles to their equivalents in Wikipedia (cf the 1911 verification project).